1. Field
The present disclosure relates to techniques for communicating optical signals. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a laser source for an optical signal that includes a ring-resonator reflector and a silicon-optical amplifier (SOA).
2. Related Art
Silicon photonics is a promising technology that can provide large communication bandwidth, low latency and low power consumption for inter-chip and intra-chip connections. In the last few years, significant progress has been made in developing low-cost components for use in inter-chip and intra-chip silicon-photonic connections, including: high-bandwidth efficient silicon modulators, low-loss optical waveguides, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) components, and high-speed CMOS optical-waveguide photo-detectors. However, a suitable low-cost WDM laser source remains a challenge and poses an obstacle to implementing WDM silicon-photonic links.
In particular, existing WDM lasers (such as those used to transmit optical signals in WDM telecommunications systems) are usually very expensive and typically have high power consumption (on the order of a few percent of wall-plug efficiency, which is defined as the coupled-out laser power divided by the total consumed electrical power). Because future WDM silicon-photonic links are expected to include thousands of optical channels (or more), which each consume around 1 mW of optical power, the power consumption of the WDM laser sources is likely to be prohibitive and may obviate the low-power advantage of WDM silicon-photonic links.
Hence, what is needed is a laser source without the above-described problems.